Keziah Coffin eBook

IN WHICH KEZIAH HEARS TWO PROPOSALS AND THE BEGINNING OF A THIRD

Trumet in a fog; a fog blown in during the night by
the wind from the wide Atlantic. So wet and heavy
that one might taste the salt in it. So thick
that houses along the main road were but dim shapes
behind its gray drapery, and only the gates and fences
of the front yards were plainly in evidence to the
passers-by. The beach plum and bayberry bushes
on the dunes were spangled with beady drops. The
pole on Cannon Hill, where the beacon was hoisted
when the packet from Boston dropped anchor in the
bay, was shiny and slippery. The new weathervane,
a gilded whale, presented to the “Regular”
church by Captain Zebedee Mayo, retired whaler, swam
in a sea of cloud. The lichened eaves of the little
“Come-Outer” chapel dripped at sedate intervals.
The brick walk leading to the door of Captain Elkanah
Daniels’s fine residence held undignified puddles
in its hollows. And, through the damp stillness,
the muttered growl of the surf, three miles away at
the foot of the sandy bluffs by the lighthouse, sounded
ominously.

Directly opposite Captain Elkanah’s front gate,
on the other side of the main road, stood the little
story-and-a-half house, also the captain’s property,
which for fourteen years had been tenanted by Mrs.
Keziah Coffin and her brother, Solomon Hall, the shoemaker.
But Solomon had, the month before, given up his fight
with debt and illness and was sleeping quietly in
Trumet’s most populous center, the graveyard.
And Keziah, left alone, had decided that the rent
and living expenses were more than her precarious
earnings as a seamstress would warrant, and, having
bargained with the furniture dealer in Wellmouth for
the sale of her household effects, was now busy getting
them ready for the morrow, when the dealer’s
wagon was to call. She was going to Boston, where
a distant and condescending rich relative had interested
himself to the extent of finding her a place as sewing
woman in a large tailoring establishment.

The fog hung like a wet blanket over the house and
its small yard, where a few venerable pear trees,
too conservative in their old age to venture a bud
even though it was almost May, stood bare and forlorn.
The day was dismal. The dismantled dining room,
its tables and chairs pushed into a corner, and its
faded ingrain carpet partially stripped from the floor,
was dismal, likewise. Considering all things,
one might have expected Keziah herself to be even
more dismal. But, to all outward appearances,
she was not. A large portion of her thirty-nine
years of life had been passed under a wet blanket,
so to speak, and she had not permitted the depressing
covering to shut out more sunshine than was absolutely
necessary. “If you can’t get cream,
you might as well learn to love your sasser of skim
milk,” said practical Keziah.